The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

6i8 The Highland Monthly.
" Have you ever heard of anyone who spoke to a
ghost?" asked Seuman Ruadh.
" Yes," returned Seoras, " I heard of a widow who was
so much troubled by her husband's ghost constantly visit-
ing her, that she went to the parish minister and asked his
advice on the matter. The minister advised her to go to
the church at night with a Bible in her hand, and with her
eyes draw an imaginary circle round her while she recited
these lines from the 93rd Psalm :—
' Is treise Dia ta chomhnuidh shuas
Na fuaim nan uisge garbh',
Is treise Dia na sumainnean,
Is tonna cuain gu dearbh.'
" The woman did so, and in a short time the ghost came
and stood outside the imaginary circle. Then she spoke
to him, but what passed between them was never known,
for the woman said the ghost forbade her to reveal what
his business was, and shortly after she died."
" I heard another story told of a shoemaker who one
dark night met near a churchyard what he took to be an
old woman. He made some common remark to her, when
she told him she had been dead for the last sixty years,
and she commanded him to return to the churchyard a
bone he had picked up there that morning and which he
used for polishing the soles of boots, that it was her shinbone
and she could not rest till it was restored. The
shoemaker, greatly alarmed, went home in all haste for the
bone, and immediately returned with it and placed it in the
churchyard, and the ghost never troubled him again."
" Did you ever see a ghost yourself?" asked Aonghas
Ban.
" No," replied the old man, " but I once saw a Avraith."
" What is a wraith ?" Alan Breac enquired.
" It is the spirit of a living person, Alan, as a ghost is
the spirit of a dead one."
" Whose wraith did you see?"